So far I've liked installing Precise Puppy 5.4 but now I've been experiencing some weird graphical glitching. I wish that I could take a screen capture to show you what I'm talking about but it would be very difficult since part of the glitching are icons that have just square boxes for fonts. And the icons on my desktop are now just upside down red triangles with the same small box shape objects for fonts.

Has anyone else experienced this yet. Maybe someone can upload a screen capture so you can see what I mean.

As far as I know, a similar command is run in only /etc/rc.d/rc.update. I disagree with how it's handled in rc.update and change it for Slacko versions.

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Rationale:

At some point the system starts looking for loaders.cache in /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/gdk-pixbuf-2.0/2.10.0. If that happens then looaders.cache becomes a broken symlink. This is because /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu is actually a symlink to /usr/lib

Nothing in /usr/etc. I don't know at what point the system starts looking in i386-linux-gnu but I do know creating the actual file instead of a symlink is a solution [with the command I posted above]._________________Woof Mailing List | keep the faith |

Hi,
I am very new user, only 1 week old .. I have been running Precise Puppy Ver 5.4.2 on a SD Card for the past week and all worked very well.
Only extra programs I had loaded on the SD card were Firefox Browser and VLC Player.
I decided to install on Hard Drive and it worked fine until I downloaded VLC Player when near the end of the package download the screens displayed square boxes instead of characters.
I closed down the package manager and rebooted the machine only to find that now all the icons have changed to Triangles.
I have started from scratch again .. did a full re-load onto HD and did same downloads ie Mozilla FireFox ..Ok ... however VLC Player all squares again.
The machine works fine with the SD card however not with HD ??
I have read this Thread about making a symbolic link , however don't have a clue what that means .... pity !!
Can anyone help
I am using a Aspire One laptop
regards
Repip

I have read this Thread about making a symbolic link , however don't have a clue what that means .... pity !!

Since it sounds like you may be new to entering commands in a terminal window, I'll try to provide enough detail. Forgive me if I tell you things that you already know.

Normally you would open a terminal window by clicking on the desktop icon labeled "Console", but you can't read those labels at the moment. On most Puppies, that icon is in the top row on the far right unless you relocated it. Try clicking that icon and a window named "urxvt" should open.

(If that doesn't work, you can use the "Urxvt terminal emulator" item in the menus, usually in the Utility sub-menu.)

In order to help us troubleshoot this problem, it would be very helpful if you would report the output from a couple of commands in your next post. The best way to enter suggested commands is to copy and paste them. Pasting in the terminal window is probably different from what you may be used to in other applications. Once you have copied one line from the "Code" box below, go to the urxvt window by giving it a left-click, then paste by clicking your middle mouse button. (If you don't have a middle mouse button, hold your Shift key and press your Insert key.) Finally, press Enter to execute the command.

Repeat for the other command.

(If copying and pasting don't work for you, you can always type the command. Please note that there are no one digits ('1') in the following commands, only lower case L's ('l').)

What output do you get for these commands?

Code:

ls -ld /lib/i386-linux-gnu
ls -ld /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu

This will tell us if those items are still symbolic links, as they should be, or if the installation of VLC Player changed them to directories or removed them entirely.

Hi npierce,
Whatever you tell me is all new ... so please treat me "gently" ... ha ..
I found urxvt and typed in the commands, tried to Copy/Paste results Ctrl-C to a text document to attach to this email however that obviously doesn't work in Linux, so wrote the results down , here they are.

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 2 Nov 29 11:28 /lib/i386-linux-gnu->./

next command returns this

drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Dec 6 14:32 /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu

strange that everything works Ok if I boot up on the SD Card ?
Is it possible to get the system / applications that I want onto the SD Card and then merely "copy" all that onto the Hard Drive ie without doing a "install" onto the hard drive? or doesn't it work that way ?

PS
Thankyou for the help, I am really keen to learn a little about Puppy and migrate from Windows, Puppy appears so far to be so much faster and simpler.

Yes, although copying and pasting with Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V works with many applications in Puppy, copying and pasting to and from the urxvt window requires another method. To copy, just highlight the text with your mouse and left button, like usual, but don't press Ctrl-C. To paste, left-click on the window that you want to paste to, then click the middle mouse button -- nowadays that button is usually a scroll wheel (in this case, press it, don't spin it). If you have no such button or scroll wheel, you can click both left and right buttons simultaneously, but that usually requires a bit of practice to get it right -- at first it can be a little frustrating. Alternatively, pasting into the urxvt window can be done with Shift-Insert, but that doesn't work going the other way (pasting text from the urxvt window into another application).

Anyway, your hand copying worked fine. The results indicate that installing VLC Player didn't affect /lib/i386-linux-gnu, but did change /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu from a symbolic link (or "symlink") to a directory. (The 'l' at the start of the output for /lib/i386-linux-gnu indicates that it is still a link; the 'd' at the start of the output for /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu indicates that it is now a directory.) (If you are unsure of what a symlink is, feel free to ask.)

You are not the only one who has run into this problem. By providing that output, you have helped bring us closer to tracking down the root cause of the problem.

As you say, it seems strange that this works fine with your SD card. But Puppy does things differently internally depending upon what mode it is running in, so a bug that shows up in one mode may not appear in another.

It will help if we know what mode your Puppy is running in, and how the DISTRO_ARCHDIR variable is defined. Please report the results of these two commands:

Code:

grep ARCHDIR /etc/DISTRO_SPECS
grep PUPMODE /etc/rc.d/PUPSTATE

Of course I know that you also want to get your icons and their captions back, and not just report results of various commands. These commands may do that:

These commands will save some of the files that were installed with VLC Player in a temporary directory, then remove the directory that was created, and recreate the correct symlink.

After running these commands, save anything you are working on and restart the X Server by going to the menu and choosing Restart X Server from the Shutdown submenu. I think that may restore your icons and their text. If not, try rebooting the PC.

Please, let us know if that works.

If it does work, you may then be able to get VLC Player to work after executing the following command. Since VLC Player worked for you when installed on your SD card, I don't anticipate any real danger here, but if you have saved anything that you don't want to loose, it might be a good idea to back it up before running this command, just in case.

Code:

cp -a -f --remove-destination /root/temporary_vlc_libs/* /usr/lib/

This copies the library files that you previously saved in the temporary directory, and puts them where the applications can find them.

Repip wrote:

Is it possible to get the system / applications that I want onto the SD Card and then merely "copy" all that onto the Hard Drive ie without doing a "install" onto the hard drive? or doesn't it work that way ?

Well, in theory, yes. But knowing what to copy is the hard part. When a package is installed, a list of its files is saved in /root/.packages. But if the packages caused dependency packages to be installed, and if the dependency packages cause more dependency packages to be installed, and . . . Well, you might have to chase down a lot of files. And then with some packages there are install scripts that you would need to examine. So, yes, it can be done. But with any luck we can solve this problem and you won't have to resort to doing that.

Repip wrote:

Thankyou for the help, I am really keen to learn a little about Puppy and migrate from Windows, Puppy appears so far to be so much faster and simpler.

npierce,
Thankyou Session Icons restored, by the way i am not too concerned at this stage about any 'glitches' with the Laptop as i haven't loaded any personal stuff on it yet, just Puppy and Mozilla and VLC Player.
I have other computers to work with so at this stage I will just experiment with Puppy until I am confident with it then load personal stuff on.
It really is a simple quick exercise to completely reload Puppy anyway so I am willing to try anything at this point.

So the results are ... unfortunately I couldn't copy/paste into a text doc because the characters were all squares so I didn't know what button etc to press to save etc.
So i had to write the results down ...